Saturday, March 23

7:30pm

Casey Cep: Furious Hours

Reverend Willie Maxwell was a rural preacher accused of murdering five of his family members for insurance money in the 1970s. With the help of a savvy lawyer, he escaped justice for years until a relative shot him dead at the funeral of his last victim. Despite hundreds of witnesses, Maxwell’s …

Reverend Willie Maxwell was a rural preacher accused of murdering five of his family members for insurance money in the 1970s. With the help of a savvy lawyer, he escaped justice for years until a relative shot him dead at the funeral of his last victim. Despite hundreds of witnesses, Maxwell’s murderer was acquitted—thanks to the same attorney who had previously defended the Reverend.

Sitting in the audience during the vigilante’s trial was Harper Lee, who had traveled from New York City to her native Alabama with the idea of writing her own In Cold Blood, the true-crime classic she had helped her friend Truman Capote research seventeen years earlier. Lee spent a year in town reporting, and many more years working on her own version of the case.

Now Casey Cep brings this story to life, from the shocking murders to the courtroom drama to the racial politics of the Deep South. At the same time, she offers a deeply moving portrait of one of the country’s most beloved writers and her struggle with fame, success, and the mystery of artistic creativity.

Casey Cep is a writer from the Eastern Shore of Maryland. After graduating from Harvard she earned an M.Phil. at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The New Republic, among many other publications. This is her first book.

Monday, March 25

7:30pm

Ian Frisch: Magic Is Dead

Magic Is Dead is Ian Frisch’s head-first dive into a hidden world full of extraordinary characters and highly guarded secrets. It is a story of imagination, deception, and art that spotlights today’s most brilliant young magicians—a mysterious society known as the52, who are revolutionizing an ancient…

Magic Is Dead is Ian Frisch’s head-first dive into a hidden world full of extraordinary characters and highly guarded secrets. It is a story of imagination, deception, and art that spotlights today’s most brilliant young magicians—a mysterious society known as the52, who are revolutionizing an ancient artform under the mantra Magic Is Dead.

Ian brings us with him as he not only gets to know this fascinating world, but also becomes an integral part of it. We meet the52’s founding members—Chris Ramsay, Laura London, and Daniel Madison—and explore their personal demons, professional aspirations, and what drew them to their art. We join them at private gatherings of the most extraordinary magicians working today, follow them to magic conventions in Las Vegas and London, and discover some of the best tricks of the trade. We also encounter David Blaine, a close friend of Madison’s; hang out with Penn Jillette; and meet Dynamo, the U.K.’s most famous magician. Magic Is Dead is also a chronicle of magic’s rich history and how it has changed in the internet age, as the young guns moves away from the old-school take on the craft.

As he tells the story of the52, and his role as its most unlikely member, Ian reveals his own connection with trickery and deceit, how he first learned the elements that make magic work from his poker-playing mother, and recalls their adventures in card rooms and casinos after his father’s sudden death. “Magic—the romanticism of the inexplicable, the awe and admiration of the unexpected—is an underlying force in how we view the world and its myriad possibilities,” Ian writes. As his journey continues, Ian not only becomes a performer and creator of magic, he also cements a new brotherhood, and begins to understand his relationship with his father, fifteen years after his death. Written with psychological acuity and a keen eye for detail, Magic Is Dead is an engrossing tale full of wonder and surprise.

Ian Frisch has written for The New Yorker, the New York Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, Wired, the Washington Post Magazine, Playboy, Longreads, and Vice. He was shortlisted for the 2016 Associated Press Sports Editors Explanatory Award, and has made numerous appearances on Bloomberg Television. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Tuesday, March 26

7:30pm

Clive Thompson: Coders w/ Anil Dash

Programmers are among the most quietly influential people on the planet, and any serious engagement with the world demands an engagement with code and its consequences. Clive Thompson takes readers close to some of the great coders of our time, and unpacks the surprising history of the field, beginning…

Programmers are among the most quietly influential people on the planet, and any serious engagement with the world demands an engagement with code and its consequences. Clive Thompson takes readers close to some of the great coders of our time, and unpacks the surprising history of the field, beginning with the first great coders, who were women.

Who exactly are the coders building today’s world? When most are college-educated, white men, how does that impact the digital world they are building? For example, if women or people of color had been involved in the early days of Twitter, would their experiences with bullying have shaped how the platform dealt with cyberbullying? Thompson also examines the intersection of coding and groundbreaking developments in artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and virtual reality.

Clive Thompson is a longtime contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired. He is the author of Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better.

Anil Dash is the CEO of Glitch, the friendly community where millions of creators collaborate to discover and create apps together. He is recognized as one of the most prominent voices advocating for a more humane, inclusive and ethical technology industry through his work as an entrepreneur, activist and writer. Dash also hosts Function, a podcast exploring how tech is shaping culture and society, which leapt into the top 5 technology podcasts in Apple's store just after its launch in 2018.

Wednesday, March 27

7:30pm

Bryan Washington: Lot w/ Jia Tolentino

Around him, others live and thrive and die in Houston’s myriad neighborhoods: a young woman whose affair detonates across an apartment complex, a ragtag baseball team, a group of young hustlers, hurricane survivors, a local drug dealer who takes a Guatemalan teen under his wing, a reluctant chupacabra.…

Around him, others live and thrive and die in Houston’s myriad neighborhoods: a young woman whose affair detonates across an apartment complex, a ragtag baseball team, a group of young hustlers, hurricane survivors, a local drug dealer who takes a Guatemalan teen under his wing, a reluctant chupacabra.

Bryan Washington’s brilliant, viscerally drawn world vibrates with energy, wit, and the infinite longing of people searching for home. With soulful insight into what makes a community, a family, and a life, Lot explores trust and love in all its unsparing and unsteady forms.

Bryan Washington has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, BuzzFeed, Vulture, The Paris Review, Tin House, One Story, Bon Appétit, MUNCHIES, American Short Fiction, GQ, FADER, The Awl, and Catapult. He lives in Houston.

Jia Tolentino is a staff writer at the New Yorker. She grew up in Texas, went to University of Virginia, and got her MFA in fiction from the University of Michigan. Trick Mirror, her first essay collection, will be published by Random House in 2019.

Thursday, March 28

7:30pm

Duncan Hannah: 20th Century Boy w/ Gerry Howard

Celebrated painter Duncan Hannah arrived in New York City from Minneapolis in the early 1970s as an art student hungry for experience, game for almost anything, and with a prodigious taste for drugs, girls, alcohol, movies, rock and roll, books, parties, and everything else the city had to offer. …

Celebrated painter Duncan Hannah arrived in New York City from Minneapolis in the early 1970s as an art student hungry for experience, game for almost anything, and with a prodigious taste for drugs, girls, alcohol, movies, rock and roll, books, parties, and everything else the city had to offer. Taken directly from the notebooks Hannah kept throughout the decade, Twentieth-Century Boy is a fascinating, sometimes lurid, and incredibly entertaining report from a now almost mythical time and place. Full of outrageously bad behavior, naked ambition, fantastically good music, and evaporating barriers of taste and decorum, and featuring cameos from David Bowie, Andy Warhol, Patti Smith, and many more, it is a rollicking account of an artist’s coming of age.

Duncan Hannah was born in Minneapolis in 1952. He attended Bard College from 1971 to 1973 and Parsons School of Design from 1973 to 1975. His work is in numerous public and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Minneapolis Art Institute. Twentieth Century Boy: Notebooks of the Seventies is his first book.

Gerry Howard is executive editor and vice president of Doubleday Books. He received the 2009 Maxwell E. Perkins Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Field of Fiction, and has worked over the years with authors such as Paul Auster, Chuck Palahniuk, Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, Pat Barker, and Hanya Hanagihara. Howard’s essays and reviews have appeared in Bookforum, Tin House, American Scholar, London Review of Books, n+1, Salon, and other publications.

Monday, April 1

7:00pm

Ruth Reichl: Save Me the Plums w/ Jeff Gordinier @ St. Ann's Church

Join Ruth Reichl and Books Are Magic as we celebrate her new memoir, Save Me the Plums with Jeff Gordinier at St. Ann's Church!
Trailblazing food writer and beloved restaurant critic Ruth Reichl took the job (and the risk) of a lifetime when she entered the glamorous, high-stakes world of magazine…

Join Ruth Reichl and Books Are Magic as we celebrate her new memoir, Save Me the Plums with Jeff Gordinier at St. Ann's Church!

Trailblazing food writer and beloved restaurant critic Ruth Reichl took the job (and the risk) of a lifetime when she entered the glamorous, high-stakes world of magazine publishing. Now, for the first time, she chronicles her groundbreaking tenure as editor in chief of Gourmet, during which she spearheaded a revolution in the way we think about food.

When Condé Nast offered Ruth Reichl the top position at America’s oldest epicurean magazine, she declined. She was a writer, not a manager, and had no inclination to be anyone’s boss. And yet…Reichl had been reading Gourmet since she was eight; it had inspired her career. How could she say no?

This is the story of a former Berkeley hippie entering the corporate world and worrying about losing her soul. It is the story of the moment restaurants became an important part of popular culture, a time when the rise of the farm-to-table movement changed, forever, the way we eat. Readers will meet legendary chefs like David Chang and Eric Ripert, idiosyncratic writers like David Foster Wallace, and a colorful group of editors and art directors who, under Reichl’s leadership, transformed stately Gourmet into a cutting-edge publication. This was the golden age of print media—the last spendthrift gasp before the Internet turned the magazine world upside down.

Ruth Reichl is the bestselling author of the memoirs Tender at the Bone, Comfort Me with Apples, Garlic and Sapphires, and For You, Mom, Finally; the novel Delicious!; and, most recently, the cookbook My Kitchen Year. She was editor in chief of Gourmet magazine for ten years. Previously she was the restaurant critic for The New York Times and served as the food editor and restaurant critic for the Los Angeles Times. She has been honored with six James Beard Awards for her journalism, magazine feature writing, and criticism. She lives in upstate New York with her husband and two cats.

Jeff Gordinier is the food and drinks editor of Esquire magazine and a contributor to the New York Times, where he was on staff as a reporter for six years. HIs work has appeared in publications such as Outside, Spin, Elle, Entertainment Weekly, Travel + Leisure, Details, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and Best Food Writing, and his book Hungry: Eating, Road-Tripping, and Risking It All with the Greatest Chef in the World is scheduled for publication by Tim Duggan Books in July 2019. He lives north of New York City with his wife, Lauren Fonda, and his four children.

This event will take place at St. Ann's Church at 157 Montague St. in Brooklyn.

Tuesday, April 2

7:30pm

Pat Cummings: Trace w/ Laurent Linn

When Trace, a recently orphaned African American middle schooler, sees a ghost wearing old-fashioned clothing in the basement of the New York Public Library, he begins to learn more about his own family’s past. Trace Carter doesn’t know how to feel at ease in his new life in New York. Even though …

When Trace, a recently orphaned African American middle schooler, sees a ghost wearing old-fashioned clothing in the basement of the New York Public Library, he begins to learn more about his own family’s past. Trace Carter doesn’t know how to feel at ease in his new life in New York. Even though his artsy Auntie Lea is cool, her brownstone still isn’t his home. Haunted by flashbacks of the accident that killed his parents, the best he can do is try to distract himself from memories of the past. But the past isn’t done with him. When Trace takes a wrong turn in the New York Public Library, he finds someone else lost in the stacks with him: a crying little boy, wearing old, tattered clothes. And though at first he can’t quite believe he’s seen a ghost, Trace soon discovers that the boy he saw has ties to Trace’s own history—and that he himself may be the key to setting the dead to rest. Author and/or illustrator of over 40 books for young readers, Pat Cummings also teaches children's book courses at Parsons and Pratt and holds a summer Boot Camp to bring writers and illustrators together with top editors and art directors. She serves on the boards of SCBWI, the Authors Guild and Authors League Fund and as Chair of the Founders Award Jury for the Society of Illustrators’ Original Art Show. Her debut middle grade novel, Trace and her most recent picture book, Beauty and the Beast, are both published by HarperCollins. Pat can be reached at write2me@patcummings.com or followed on Twitter @PatCummingsBook. Laurent Linn is the author/illustrator of the critically acclaimed YA novel Draw the Line, published to multiple starred reviews, that the New York Times called “epic.” He is also Art Director at Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, where he collaborates on picture books, middle grade, and teen novels with both celebrated and new illustrators and authors. Laurent began his career as a puppet designer/builder in Jim Henson’s Muppet Workshop, creating characters for productions including the Muppet Christmas Carol and Muppet Treasure Island films, and eventually becoming the Creative Director for the Sesame Street Muppets, winning an Emmy Award. www.laurentlinn.com This event is free! Let us know you're coming on Facebook.

Tuesday, April 2

7:30pm

Patricia Marx and Roz Chast: Why Don’t You Write My Eulogy Now So I Can Correct It? w/ Emily Flak

Every mother knows best, but New Yorker writer Patty Marx's knows better. Patty has never been able to shake her mother's one-line witticisms from her brain, so she's collected them into a book, accompanied by full color illustrations by New Yorker staff cartoonist Roz Chast. These snappy maternal …

Every mother knows best, but New Yorker writer Patty Marx's knows better. Patty has never been able to shake her mother's one-line witticisms from her brain, so she's collected them into a book, accompanied by full color illustrations by New Yorker staff cartoonist Roz Chast. These snappy maternal cautions include:

If you feel guilty about throwing away leftovers, put them in the back of your refrigerator for five days and then throw them out.

If you run out of food at your dinner party, the world will end.

When traveling, call the hotel from the airport to say there aren't enough towels in your room and, by the way, you'd like a room with a better view.

Why don't you write my eulogy now so I can correct it?

Every child will want to buy this for mom on Mother's Day!

Patricia Marx has been contributing to The New Yorker since 1989. She is a former writer for “Saturday Night Live” and “Rugrats,” and is the author of several books. Marx was the first woman elected to the Harvard Lampoon. She has taught screenwriting and humor writing at Princeton, New York University, and Stony Brook University. She was the recipient of a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship.

Roz Chast has loved to draw cartoons since she was a child growing up in Brooklyn. She attended Rhode Island School of Design, majoring in Painting because it seemed more artistic. However, soon after graduating, she reverted to type and began drawing cartoons once again.

Emily Flake is a cartoonist, writer, performer and illustrator living in Brooklyn, NY. Her work appears regularly in the New Yorker, the Nib, the American Bystander, and numerous other publications. Her book of cartoons and essays about parenting, Mama Tried, was published by Grand Central in 2015. She performs a hybrid of cartooning and standup at venues across New York City and beyond.

Wednesday, April 3

7:30pm

Lori Gottlieb: Maybe You Should Talk to Someone w/ Katie Couric

One day, Lori Gottlieb is a therapist who helps patients in her Los Angeles practice. The next, a crisis causes her world to come crashing down. Enter Wendell, the quirky but seasoned therapist in whose of­fice she suddenly lands. With his balding head, cardigan, and khakis, he seems to have come …

One day, Lori Gottlieb is a therapist who helps patients in her Los Angeles practice. The next, a crisis causes her world to come crashing down. Enter Wendell, the quirky but seasoned therapist in whose of­fice she suddenly lands. With his balding head, cardigan, and khakis, he seems to have come straight from Therapist Central Casting. Yet he will turn out to be anything but.

As Gottlieb explores the inner chambers of her patients’ lives — a self-absorbed Hollywood producer, a young newlywed diagnosed with a terminal illness, a senior citizen threatening to end her life on her birthday if nothing gets better, and a twenty-something who can’t stop hooking up with the wrong guys — she finds that the questions they are struggling with are the very ones she is now bringing to Wendell.

With startling wisdom and humor, Gottlieb invites us into her world as both clinician and patient, examining the truths and fictions we tell ourselves and others as we teeter on the tightrope between love and desire, meaning and mortality, guilt and redemption, terror and courage, hope and change.

Lori Gottlieb is a psychotherapist and New York Times bestselling author who writes The Atlantic's weekly “Dear Therapist” advice column. A contributing editor for The Atlantic, she also writes for The New York Times Magazine, and appears as a frequent expert on relationships, parenting, and hot-button mental health topics in media such as The Today Show, Good Morning America, CBS This Morning, CNN, and NPR. Her most recent book, MAYBE YOU SHOULD TALK TO SOMEONE is in development for a television series at ABC. Learn more at LoriGottlieb.com or by following her @LoriGottlieb1 on Twitter.

Katie Couric (@katiecouric) is an award-winning journalist, Stand Up to Cancer (SU2C) co-founder, and New York Times best-selling author. SU2C has raised over $623 million to fund scientific research teams.

Friday, April 5

7:00pm

Amor Towles: A Gentleman in Moscow @ First Unitarian Church

Join Books Are Magic and Amor Towles as he celebrates the paperback release of his smash hit novel, A Gentleman in Moscow!
From the New York Times bestselling author of Rules of Civility—a transporting novel about a man who is ordered to spend the rest of his life inside a luxury hotel.
In 1922, …

Join Books Are Magic and Amor Towles as he celebrates the paperback release of his smash hit novel, A Gentleman in Moscow!

From the New York Times bestselling author of Rules of Civility—a transporting novel about a man who is ordered to spend the rest of his life inside a luxury hotel.

In 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, and is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel’s doors. Unexpectedly, his reduced circumstances provide him entry into a much larger world of emotional discovery.

Brimming with humor, a glittering cast of characters, and one beautifully rendered scene after another, this singular novel casts a spell as it relates the count’s endeavor to gain a deeper understanding of what it means to be a man of purpose.

Amor Towles was born and raised in the Boston area. He graduated from Yale University and received an MA in English from Stanford University. An investment professional for more than twenty years, he now devotes himself full time to writing. His first novel, Rules of Civility, published in 2011, was a New York Times bestseller. Towles lives in Manhattan with his wife and two children.

This event will take place at First Unitarian Congregational Society at 119 Pierrepont St. in Brookyn.

Friday, April 5

7:30pm

Mary Laura Philpott: I Miss You When I Blink w/ Mari Andrew

Mary Laura Philpott thought she’d cracked the code: Always be right, and you’ll always be happy.
But once she’d completed her life’s to-do list (job, spouse, house, babies—check!), she found that instead of feeling content and successful, she felt anxious. Lost. Stuck in a daily grind of overflowing…

But once she’d completed her life’s to-do list (job, spouse, house, babies—check!), she found that instead of feeling content and successful, she felt anxious. Lost. Stuck in a daily grind of overflowing calendars, grueling small talk, and sprawling traffic. She’d done everything “right,” but she felt all wrong. What’s the worse failure, she wondered: smiling and staying the course, or blowing it all up and running away? And are those the only options?

In this memoir-in-essays full of spot-on observations about home, work, and creative life, Philpott takes on the conflicting pressures of modern adulthood with wit and heart. She offers up her own stories to show that identity crises don’t happen just once or only at midlife; reassures us that small, recurring personal re-inventions are both normal and necessary; and advises that if you’re going to faint, you should get low to the ground first. Most of all, Philpott shows that when you stop feeling satisfied with your life, you don’t have to burn it all down and set off on a transcontinental hike (unless you want to, of course). You can call upon your many selves to figure out who you are, who you’re not, and where you belong. Who among us isn’t trying to do that?

Mary Laura Philpott’s writing has been featured in print or online by the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, O, The Oprah Magazine, McSweeney's, Paris Review, and other publications. She's the founding editor of Musing, the online magazine of Parnassus Books (where she is a bookseller), as well as an Emmy-winning cohost of the literary interview show A Word on Words on Nashville Public Television. She lives in Nashville with her family. Visit her at MaryLauraPhilpott.com.

Mari Andrew is a writer and illustrator living in New York who values optimism, resilience, vulnerability, and joie de vivre. In addition to her widely popular Instagram account, her writing and illustrations have appeared on BuzzFeed, NYLON, Paste, Bored Panda, and HelloGiggles, and she has a weekly feature on A Cup of Jo.

Monday, April 8

7:30pm

Erin Somers: Stay Up with Hugo Best w/ Blythe Roberson

June Bloom is a broke, cynical twenty-nine-year-old writers’ assistant on the late-night comedy show, Stay Up with Hugo Best. Hugo Best is in his sixties, a beloved icon of TV and humor, and a notorious womanizer. After he unexpectedly retires and a party is held for his now unemployed staff, June …

June Bloom is a broke, cynical twenty-nine-year-old writers’ assistant on the late-night comedy show, Stay Up with Hugo Best. Hugo Best is in his sixties, a beloved icon of TV and humor, and a notorious womanizer. After he unexpectedly retires and a party is held for his now unemployed staff, June ends up at a dive bar for an open-mic night and prepares for the sad return to the anonymous comedian lifestyle. What she’s not prepared for is a run-in with Hugo at that dive bar. Nor for the invitation that swiftly follows: Hugo asks June to come to his mansion in Greenwich for the long Memorial Day weekend. “No funny business,” he insists.

June, in need of a job and money, confident she can handle herself, but secretly harboring the remains of a childhood crush on the charming older comedian and former role model, accepts. The exact terms of the visit are never spelled out, but June is realistic and clear-eyed enough to guess. Even so, as the weekend unfolds and the enigmatic Hugo gradually reveals himself, their dynamic proves to be much more complicated and less predictable than she expected.

At once hilarious and poignant, brilliantly incisive and terrifically propulsive, Stay Up with Hugo Best is an incredibly timely exploration of sexual politics in the #MeToo age, and the unforgettable story of one young woman’s poignant stumbling into adulthood.

Erin Somers’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House Open Bar, Ploughshares, American Short Fiction, McSweeney’s, the Cincinnati Review, and many other publications. She holds an MFA from the University of New Hampshire and was a 2016 NYC Center for Fiction Emerging Writer Fellow and a 2016 Millay Colony resident. She lives in Beacon, New York with her husband and daughter. Stay Up with Hugo Best is her first novel.

Blythe Roberson is a writer and comedian whose work has been published by the New Yorker, The Onion, ClickHole, VICE Magazine, and others. She works as a researcher at The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Blythe is the author of How to Date Men When You Hate Men.

Tuesday, April 16

7:30pm

Sally Rooney: Normal People w/ Emma Straub

At school Connell and Marianne pretend not to know each other. He’s popular and well-adjusted, star of the school football team, while she is lonely, proud and intensely private. But when Connell comes to pick his mother up from her job at Marianne’s house, a strange and indelible connection grows …

At school Connell and Marianne pretend not to know each other. He’s popular and well-adjusted, star of the school football team, while she is lonely, proud and intensely private. But when Connell comes to pick his mother up from her job at Marianne’s house, a strange and indelible connection grows between the two teenagers—one they are determined to conceal.

A year later, they’re both studying at Trinity College in Dublin. Marianne has found her feet in a new social world while Connell hangs at the sidelines, shy and uncertain. Throughout their years at university, Marianne and Connell circle one another, straying toward other people and possibilities but always magnetically, irresistibly drawn back together. And as she veers into self-destruction and he begins to search for meaning elsewhere, each must confront how far they are willing to go to save the other.

Sally Rooney was born in the west of Ireland in 1991. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Granta and The London Review of Books. Winner of the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award in 2017, she is the author of Conversations with Friends and the editor of the Irish literary journal The Stinging Fly.

Emma Straub is from New York City. She is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Modern Lovers and The Vacationers. Her fiction and nonfiction have been published by Tin House, The Paris Review Daily, Time, Slate, and the New York Times, and Rookie. She lives with her husband in Brooklyn, where she co-owns Books Are Magic.

This event is free and in collaboration with the Irish Arts Center. Let us know you're coming on Facebook.

Wednesday, April 17

7:30pm

Myla Goldberg: Feast Your Eyes w/ Joshua Ferris

After discovering photography as a teenager through her high school's photo club, Lillian rejects her parents' expectations of college and marriage and moves to New York City in 1955. When a small gallery exhibits partially nude photographs of Lillian and her daughter Samantha, Lillian is arrested,…

After discovering photography as a teenager through her high school's photo club, Lillian rejects her parents' expectations of college and marriage and moves to New York City in 1955. When a small gallery exhibits partially nude photographs of Lillian and her daughter Samantha, Lillian is arrested, thrust into the national spotlight, and targeted with an obscenity charge. Mother and daughter's sudden notoriety changes the course of both of their lives and especially Lillian's career as she continues her quest for artistic legitimacy and recognition.

The story is inspired by well-known photographers Sally Mann and Diane Arbus. There are also aspects of Patti Smith's story here, in the making of a young woman artist in New York City. The perfect read for those who loved Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers or Alice McDermott's The Ninth Hour.

Myla Goldberg is a bestselling novelist, winner of the Borders New Voices Prize, a finalist for the Hemingway Foundation/PEN award, the NYPL Young Lions award, and the Barnes & Noble Discover award, and recipient of a Sustainable Arts Foundation grant. She writes and teaches in Brooklyn, where she lives with her husband Jason Little and their two daughters.

Joshua Ferris is the bestselling author of three novels, Then We Came to the End, The Unnamed and To Rise Again at a Decent Hour. He was a finalist for the National Book Award, winner of the Barnes and Noble Discover Award and the PEN/Hemingway Award, and was named one of The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40”writers in 2010. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, and Best American Short Stories. He lives in New York.

Thursday, April 18

7:30pm

Sarah Blake: Naamah

With the coming of the Great Flood—the mother of all disasters—only one family was spared, drifting on an endless sea, waiting for the waters to subside. We know the story of Noah, moved by divine vision to launch their escape. Now, in a work of astounding invention, acclaimed writer Sarah Blake …

With the coming of the Great Flood—the mother of all disasters—only one family was spared, drifting on an endless sea, waiting for the waters to subside. We know the story of Noah, moved by divine vision to launch their escape. Now, in a work of astounding invention, acclaimed writer Sarah Blake reclaims the story of his wife, Naamah, the matriarch who kept them alive. Here is the woman torn between faith and fury, lending her strength to her sons and their wives, caring for an unruly menagerie of restless creatures, silently mourning the lover she left behind. Here is the woman escaping into the unreceded waters, where a seductive angel tempts her to join a strange and haunted world. Here is the woman tormented by dreams and questions of her own—questions of service and self-determination, of history and memory, of the kindness or cruelty of fate.

In fresh and modern language, Blake revisits the story of the Ark that rescued life on earth, and rediscovers the agonizing burdens endured by the woman at the heart of the story. Naamah is a parable for our time: a provocative fable of body, spirit, and resilience.

Sarah Blake is the recipient of a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her writing has appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Threepenny Review, Slice, and elsewhere.

Monday, April 22

7:30pm

Rachel Cline: The Question Authority w/ Lisa Miller

A middle-aged woman enters into a negotiation with her childhood best friend and confronts the damage done by their eighth grade teacher, who molested them both.
Nora Buchbinder—formerly rich and now broke—would be the last woman in Brooklyn to claim #MeToo, but when a work assignment reunites her…

A middle-aged woman enters into a negotiation with her childhood best friend and confronts the damage done by their eighth grade teacher, who molested them both.

Nora Buchbinder—formerly rich and now broke—would be the last woman in Brooklyn to claim #MeToo, but when a work assignment reunites her with her childhood best friend, Beth, she finds herself in a hall of mirrors. Was their eighth grade teacher Beth's lover or her rapist? Where were the grown-ups? What should justice look like, after so much time has passed? And what can Nora do, now?

Nora’s memories, and Beth’s, and those of their classmates, their former teacher, and members of his family, bring to light some of the ways we absorb and manage unbearable behavior. From denial to reinvention, self-pity to self-righteousness, endless questioning to intransigent certainty, readers will recognize the ripples sent into the lives of others by one broken man.

Rachel Cline, author of the novels What to Keep and My Liar, has written for the New York Times, New York, More, SELF, and Tin House magazines, and is a produced screen and television writer. For five years, she was a screenwriting instructor at the University of Southern California and has taught fiction writing at New York University, Eugene Lang College, and Sarah Lawrence College. She has been a resident at Yaddo, a fellow at Sewanee, and a Girls Write Now mentor. She lives in Brooklyn Heights, a few blocks from where she grew up.

Lisa Miller is a contributing editor at New York magazine, covering politics, culture, education, mental health, parenting, and gender, among other topics. She writes features for the magazine, and regular columns for New York’s women’s site The Cut. She is the former religion columnist for the Washington Post and a former senior editor of Newsweek magazine, and author of Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination with the Afterlife. In 2014, she was nominated for a National Magazine Award and featured in Best Magazine Writing, and in 2017 she was on the team that produced the ASME-award winning video "Guns and Empathy." She is a three-time winner of the New York Newswomen's award for feature writing and has won the prestigious Wilbur Award for religion reporting numerous times. She has appeared on MSNBC, CBS This Morning, Nightline, The O’Reilly Factor, and The Colbert Report, among other outlets, and has been a guest lecturer at Yale University, Columbia University, Syracuse University, and Emory University. She graduated from Oberlin College and lives in Brooklyn.

Tuesday, April 23

7:00am

Jennifer Epstein: Wunderland w/ Chris Bohjalian

nspired by a true story, Jennifer Cody Epstein’s Wunderland is an ambitious, multigenerational saga that crosses decades, borders, and warzones. Drawn together by shared idealism and mutual bookishness, Ilse Fischer and Renate Bauer form a passionate friendship that will be ripped apart by Germany’s…

nspired by a true story, Jennifer Cody Epstein’s Wunderland is an ambitious, multigenerational saga that crosses decades, borders, and warzones. Drawn together by shared idealism and mutual bookishness, Ilse Fischer and Renate Bauer form a passionate friendship that will be ripped apart by Germany’s race laws—and a shocking betrayal. Three decades later, struggling East Village artist Ava Fisher receives her estranged mother Ilse’s ashes in the mail—along with a trove of unsent letters to a woman named Renate Bauer. It’s a discovery that will launch Ava onto the gritty streets of 1980’s New York City—and on a collision course with a dark revelation about both her mother’s hidden past that will shake her to her very core.

Hailed as “a devastating tale bound for bestseller lists,” “a vividly written and stark chronicle of Nazism and its legacies” and “an absorbing exploration of friendship, betrayal, and coming to terms with the past” in starred reviews by Publishers Weekly, Kirkus and Booklist, Wunderland draws readers into the lives of complex, flawed characters whose worlds intersect in ways both life-affirming and tragic, right up until the novel’s stunning conclusion. The result is a propulsive, page-turning narrative that deep-dives into the secrets we keep from others, the lies we tell ourselves, and humanity’s potential for both unspeakable evil and immense goodness….and a story that resonates startlingly amid today’s troubled world.

Jennifer Cody Epstein is the author of the international bestseller The Painter from Shanghai, and The Gods of Heavenly Punishment, and winner of the 2014 Asian Pacific Association of Librarians Honor award for outstanding fiction. She has written for The Wall Street Journal, Vogue, Self, Mademoiselle, and many others. She has an MFA in fiction from Columbia University and an MA in international affairs from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two daughters.

Chris Bohjalian is the author of twenty books, including The Guest Room; Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands; The Sandcastle Girls; Skeletons at the Feast; The Double Bind; and Midwives which was a number one New York Times bestseller and a selection of Oprah's Book Club. Chris's work has been translated into more than thirty languages, and three novels have become movies (Secrets of Eden, Midwives, and Past the Bleachers). Chris lives in Vermont and can be found at www.chrisbohjalian.com or on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Litsy, and Goodreads.

Friday, April 26

7:30pm

Leanne Shapton presents Guestbook: Ghost Stories

This collection of bold and scathingly beautiful feminist poems imagines what comes after our current age of environmental destruction, racism, sexism, and divisive politics.
Informed by Brenda Shaughnessy's craft as a poet and her worst fears as a mother, the poems in The Octopus Museum blaze forth…

This collection of bold and scathingly beautiful feminist poems imagines what comes after our current age of environmental destruction, racism, sexism, and divisive politics.

Informed by Brenda Shaughnessy's craft as a poet and her worst fears as a mother, the poems in The Octopus Museum blaze forth from her pen: in these pages, we see that what was once a generalized fear for our children (car accidents, falling from a tree) is now hyper-reasonable, specific, and multiple: school shootings, nuclear attack, loss of health care, a polluted planet. As Shaughnessy conjures our potential future, she movingly (and often with humor) envisions an age where cephalopods might rule over humankind, a fate she suggests we may just deserve after destroying their oceans. These heartbreaking, terrified poems are the battle cry of a woman who is fighting for the survival of the world she loves, and a stirring exhibition of who we are as a civilization.

Brenda Shaughnessy was born in Okinawa, Japan, and grew up in Southern California. She is the author of four books of poetry, including So Much Synth, Human Dark with Sugar—winner of the James Laughlin Award and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award—and Our Andromeda, which was a New York Times Book Review 100 Notable Books of 2013. She is an assistant professor of English at Rutgers University, Newark. She lives in New Jersey.

Evan James is an award-winning writer whose personal essays and fiction have appeared in such publications as the Oxford American, Travel + Leisure, and The New York Times, among others. He received an MFA in Fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has received fellowships from Yaddo, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The Carson McCullers Center, The Elizabeth Kostova Foundation, The University of Iowa, and the Lambda Literary Writers’ Retreat, where he was a 2017 Emerging LGBTQ Voices Fellow. He has taught at The University of Iowa, The Iowa Young Writers’ Studio, and Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. Born in Seattle, he now lives in New York and teaches creative writing and English at Pierrepont School in Westport, Connecticut.

Tuesday, April 30

7:30pm

Camonghne Felix: Build Yourself a Boat

“Camonghne Felix is a brilliant writer, thinker, imaginer, builder—a young leader who shifts and opens the possibilities for a more just, better lit world, with each step, each word, each question.” —Kathy Engel
This is about what grows through the wreckage. This is an anthem of survival and a look…

“Camonghne Felix is a brilliant writer, thinker, imaginer, builder—a young leader who shifts and opens the possibilities for a more just, better lit world, with each step, each word, each question.” —Kathy Engel

This is about what grows through the wreckage. This is an anthem of survival and a look at what might come after. A view of what floats and what, ultimately, sustains.

Build Yourself a Boat redefines the language of collective and individual trauma through lyric and memory.

Camonghne Felix, M.A. is a poet, a writer, speaker, & political strategist living in New York City. She received an M.A. in Arts Politics from NYU, an MFA from Bard College, & has received Fellowships from Cave Canem, Callaloo & Poets House. Her first full-length collection of poems, Build Yourself a Boat, was a 2017 University of Wisconsin Press Brittingham & Pollak Prize finalist, a 2017 Fordham University Poets Out Loud semi-finalist, & is forthcoming from Haymarket Books in 2019. The author of the chapbook Yolk, she was recently listed by Black Youth Project as a "Black Girl From the Future You Should Know." Felix's work has been published in BuzzFeed, Poetry Magazine,Apogee, The Offing, the Academy of American Poets website, & more. She's also been featured in New York Women's Foundation Magazine, Brooklyn Poets, Politico, Teen Vogue digital, Huffington Post & more.

Thursday, May 2

7:30pm

Erika Swyler: Light From Other Stars w/ Maris Kreizman

Erika Swyler: Light From Other Stars w/ Maris Kreizman
Thursday May 02 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM
Eleven-year-old Nedda Papas is obsessed with becoming an astronaut. In 1986 in Easter, a small Florida Space Coast town, her dreams seem almost within reach—if she can just grow up fast enough. Theo, the scientist…

Erika Swyler: Light From Other Stars w/ Maris Kreizman

Thursday May 02 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM

Eleven-year-old Nedda Papas is obsessed with becoming an astronaut. In 1986 in Easter, a small Florida Space Coast town, her dreams seem almost within reach—if she can just grow up fast enough. Theo, the scientist father she idolizes, is consumed by his own obsessions. Laid off from his job at NASA and still reeling from the loss of Nedda’s newborn brother several years before, Theo turns to the dangerous dream of extending his living daughter's childhood just a little longer. The result is an invention that alters the fabric of time.

Amidst the chaos that erupts, Nedda must confront her father and his secrets, the ramifications of which will irrevocably change her life, her community, and the entire world. But she finds an unexpected ally in Betheen, the mother she’s never quite understood, who surprises Nedda by seeing her more clearly than anyone else.

Decades later, Nedda has achieved her long-held dream, and as she floats in antigravity, far from earth, she and her crewmates face a serious crisis. Nedda may hold the key to the solution, if she can come to terms with her past and the future that awaits her.

Erika Swyler’s writing has appeared in Catapult Story, VIDA, The New York Times, and elsewhere. Her bestselling first novel, The Book of Speculation, was one of BuzzFeed’s 24 Best Fiction Books of 2015, and a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. She lives on Long Island, NY, with her husband and a mischievous rabbit.

Maris Kreizman has hosted readings and moderated literary panels at various bookstores, conferences, and festivals across the country. She is the creator of Slaughterhouse 90210, a blog and book (Flatiron Books, 2015) that celebrates the intersection of literature and pop culture. A former book editor (Free Press/S&S) and former editorial director of Book of the Month, she is also an essayist and critic whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the LA Times, Vanity Fair, BuzzFeed, Publishers Weekly, The Ringer, The Toast, The Hairpin, The Cut, Vulture, Glamour, Esquire, GQ, OUT Magazine, and more.

In her rugged Italian village, Stella is considered an oddity—beautiful and smart, insolent and cold. Stella uses her peculiar toughness to protect her slower, plainer baby sister Tina from life’s harshest realities. But she also provokes the ire of her father, Antonio, a man who demands subservience from women and whose greatest gift to his family is his absence.

When the Fortunas emigrate to America on the cusp of World War II, Stella and Tina must come of age side by side in a hostile new world with strict expectations for each of them. Soon Stella learns that her survival is worthless without the one thing her family will deny her at any cost: her independence.

In present-day Connecticut, one family member tells this heartrending story, determined to understand the persisting rift between the now elderly Stella and Tina. A richly told debut, The Seven or Eight Deaths of Stella Fortuna is a tale of family transgressions as ancient and twisted as the olive branch that could heal them.

Juliet Grames was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and grew up in a tight-knit Italian-American family. A book editor, she has spent the last decade at Soho Press, where she is associate publisher and curator of the Soho Crime imprint. This is her first novel.

Amor Towles was born and raised in the Boston area. He graduated from Yale University and received an MA in English from Stanford University. An investment professional for more than twenty years, he now devotes himself full time to writing. His first novel, Rules of Civility, published in 2011, was a New York Times bestseller. Towles lives in Manhattan with his wife and two children.

Wednesday, May 8

7:30pm

Lara Prior-Palmer: Rough Magic w/ Josephine Rowe

At the age of nineteen, Lara Prior-Palmer discovered a website devoted to “the world’s longest, toughest horse race”—an annual competition of endurance and skill that involves dozens of riders racing a series of twenty-five wild ponies across 1,000 kilometers of Mongolian grassland. On a whim, she …

At the age of nineteen, Lara Prior-Palmer discovered a website devoted to “the world’s longest, toughest horse race”—an annual competition of endurance and skill that involves dozens of riders racing a series of twenty-five wild ponies across 1,000 kilometers of Mongolian grassland. On a whim, she decided to enter the race. As she boarded a plane to East Asia, she was utterly unprepared for what awaited her.

Riders often spend years preparing to compete in the Mongol Derby, a course that recreates the horse messenger system developed by Genghis Khan, and many fail to finish. Prior-Palmer had no formal training. She was driven by her own restlessness, stubbornness, and a lifelong love of horses. She raced for ten days through extreme heat and terrifying storms, catching a few hours of sleep where she could at the homes of nomadic families. Battling bouts of illness and dehydration, exhaustion and bruising falls, she decided she had nothing to lose. Each dawn she rode out again on a fresh horse, scrambling up mountains, swimming through rivers, crossing woodlands and wetlands, arid dunes and open steppe, as American television crews chased her in their Jeeps.

Lara Prior-Palmer was born in London in 1994. She studied conceptual history and Persian at Stanford University. In 2013, she competed in the 1,000-kilometer Mongol Derby in Mongolia, sometimes described as the world’s toughest and longest horse race, and became the first woman to win the race, and the youngest person ever to finish. Rough Magic is her first book.

Josephine Rowe was born in 1984 in Rockhampton, Australia, and grew up in Melbourne. In the United States, her writing has appeared in Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, The Iowa Review, The Paris Review Daily, The Common, and Freeman’s. She holds fellowships from the Wallace Stegner program in fiction at Stanford University, the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, the Omi International Arts Center, and Yaddo. She was the winner of Australia’s Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize in 2016 and has been named one of The Sydney Morning Herald’s Best Young Australian Novelists. Her debut novel, A Loving, Faithful Animal, was long-listed for the 2017 Miles Franklin Literary Award and selected as a New York Times Editors’ Choice.

Thursday, May 9

7:30pm

Celeste Ng: Little Fires Everywhere w/ Mira Jacob

In Shaker Heights, a placid, progressive suburb of Cleveland, everything is planned - from the layout of the winding roads, to the colors of the houses, to the successful lives its residents will go on to lead. And no one embodies this spirit more than Elena Richardson, whose guiding principle is …

In Shaker Heights, a placid, progressive suburb of Cleveland, everything is planned - from the layout of the winding roads, to the colors of the houses, to the successful lives its residents will go on to lead. And no one embodies this spirit more than Elena Richardson, whose guiding principle is playing by the rules.

Enter Mia Warren - an enigmatic artist and single mother - who arrives in this idyllic bubble with her teenaged daughter Pearl, and rents a house from the Richardsons. Soon Mia and Pearl become more than tenants: all four Richardson children are drawn to the mother-daughter pair. But Mia carries with her a mysterious past and a disregard for the status quo that threatens to upend this carefully ordered community.

When old family friends of the Richardsons attempt to adopt a Chinese-American baby, a custody battle erupts that dramatically divides the town—and puts Mia and Elena on opposing sides. Suspicious of Mia and her motives, Elena is determined to uncover the secrets in Mia’s past. But her obsession will come at unexpected and devastating costs.

Celeste Ng is the author of the New York Times bestselling novels Everything I Never Told You and Little Fires Everywhere. Her writing has been awarded the Pushcart Prize, the Massachusetts Book Award, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, among other honors. She earned an MFA from the University of Michigan and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. To learn more about her and her work, visit celesteng.com or follow her on Twitter (@pronounced_ing).

Mira Jacob is the author and illustrator of Good Talk: A Memoir in

Conversations. Her critically acclaimed novel, The Sleepwalker’s Guide to

Dancing, was a Barnes & Noble Discover New Writers pick, shortlisted for

India’s Tata First Literature Award, and longlisted for the Brooklyn Literary

Eagles Prize. It was named one of the best books of 2014 by Kirkus

Reviews, the Boston Globe, Goodreads, Bustle, and The Millions. Her writing and drawings have appeared in The New York Times, Electric Literature, Tin House, Literary Hub, Guernica, Vogue, the Telegraph, and Buzzfeed, and she has a drawn column on Shondaland. She currently teaches at The New School, and she is a founding faculty member of the MFA Program at Randolph College. She is the co-founder of Pete’s Reading Series in Brooklyn, where she spent 13 years bringing literary fiction, non-fiction, and poetry to Williamsburg. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, documentary filmmaker Jed Rothstein, and their son.

Tuesday, May 14

7:30pm

Rachel Kushner: The Mars Room

It’s 2003 and Romy Hall, named after a German actress, is at the start of two consecutive life sentences at Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility, deep in California’s Central Valley. Outside is the world from which she has been severed: her young son, Jackson, and the San Francisco of her youth.…

It’s 2003 and Romy Hall, named after a German actress, is at the start of two consecutive life sentences at Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility, deep in California’s Central Valley. Outside is the world from which she has been severed: her young son, Jackson, and the San Francisco of her youth. Inside is a new reality: thousands of women hustling for the bare essentials needed to survive; the bluffing and pageantry and casual acts of violence by guards and prisoners alike; and the deadpan absurdities of institutional living, portrayed with great humor and precision.

Stunning and unsentimental, The Mars Room is “wholly authentic…profound…luminous” (The Wall Street Journal), “one of those books that enrage you even as they break your heart” (The New York Times Book Review, cover review)—a spectacularly compelling, heart-stopping novel about a life gone off the rails in contemporary America. It is audacious and tragic, propulsive and yet beautifully refined and “affirms Rachel Kushner as one of our best novelists” (Entertainment Weekly).

Rachel Kushner is the bestselling author of The Flamethrowers, a finalist for the National Book Award and a New York Times Top Ten Book of 2013; Telex from Cuba, a finalist for the National Book Award; and The Mars Room. She lives in Los Angeles.